Skills trump family ties in immigration bill

When Varsha Shah's husband decided to sponsor 16 family members in India to join them in Jupiter, she didn't flinch. She rearranged beds and emptied the garage to make an extra room.

"I would come out of Costco with seven gallons of milk and people would say, 'Do you have a store?' " she recalled of the months her house was packed with relatives. "We don't even think about it. We enjoyed having so many kids in the house."

For three decades, U.S. immigration policy has allowed families like the Shahs, who have U.S. citizenship, to apply for green cards for their loved ones overseas. But a sweeping immigration bill before the Senate today would change that.

Best known for its provisions to offer legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants, the bill also eliminates several family-based visa categories in favor of merit-based ones. Siblings and parents of U.S. citizens, for example, would no longer be eligible for green cards, also known as lawful permanent residency cards, unless they first meet other requirements, such as holding an advanced degree.

Instead of prioritizing family ties, the new system would send men and women with special skills - mathematicians, computer analysts - to the front of the line.

Those fighting for stricter limits on immigration say the changes are necessary because the current system creates a ballooning group of eligible citizens that the country can't sustain. Currently, every new permanent resident can naturalize and petition for another set of relatives. Under the Senate bill, U.S. citizens could only petition for green cards on behalf of spouses and children under 21 years of age.

Immigrant advocates and some senators, meanwhile, say broad family reunification is a more humane policy that provides newcomers with an important support base.

"We didn't bring any money . . . Once we had no work for six months, but I have never taken unemployment or anything [from the government]," said Rajesh Shah, who arrived with his wife, Rupa, and two sons. "We had family support."

"I feel like they are closing the door on family values," added Varsha Shah, the sister-in-law who took Rajesh's family into her home when they first arrived.

The Shahs also said keeping the family together helped them stay close to their faith, Jainism - a religion with few followers in Florida. Based on a doctrine of nonviolence, it calls for followers to minimize activities that involve killing animals, plants or insects. Most don't eat meat. A few even avoid roots like carrots and potatoes, since bringing them out of the soil disrupts insects' habitat.

With the closest Jain temple in Orlando, Rajesh Shah has built an altar in his home. His prayer book is turned to an oration to help children avoid trouble, such as traffic citations. His mother, gray-haired and petite in a sari and gold bracelets, recites mantras at the altar every day.

"The way we look at it is, to give our child a well-rounded personality, they need to spend time with their grandparents. That's the way it works in our culture," said Syad Ali Rahman, who lives in Weston and also brought his parents from India to live with him. Since both he and his wife work, his parents fill the gap, he said.

Groups lobbying for stricter immigration controls say U.S. family reunification laws are far more generous than those of other industrialized countries.

John Keeley, a spokesman for the Center for Immigration Studies, said federal policies that allow immigrants to bring over their extended families are largely responsible for the massive swell of newcomers recorded in the United States in recent years. Allowing immigrants to bring elderly parents is especially taxing to the U.S. economy, he said, since they tend to be well past their prime working years and become eligible for Medicaid and Medicare when they naturalize.

"The rest of the world admits families the way we used to," he said, referring to laws before 1965 that allowed U.S. citizens to bring only their nuclear family with them. "Because I might want to immigrate to France, that doesn't have any bearing on what my sister wants to do."

If the immigration bill clears the Senate this week, the overhaul still faces tall hurdles in the House, making it uncertain whether lawmakers will include family reunification in any eventual compromise bill. Even some immigrant advocates who support the overall Senate bill have said they have problems with provisions that strip down family reunification.

"This move is a dangerous social experiment, conceived behind closed doors, with no pilot program," David Leopold, a national officer at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said of the switch to a merit-based system. "It's a radical departure."

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YET ANOTHER TEST

Senate legislation to legalize millions of unlawful immigrants faces a critical test today after surviving challenges Wednesday from both the right and left. 3A